Hastert scandal further erodes our confidence in government

The indictment of former congressman and U.S. House Speaker Dennis Hastert on May 28 immediately raised the specter of bribes and corruption as usual. Details of his case, as they spill out, are more unusual: This is more a sexual abuse case like the Catholic priest scandals than the Rod Blagojevich “pay to play” corruption schemes.

It was assumed at first to be corruption as usual because Hastert has been involved in conflicts of interest and has been a lobbyist since 2008, when he retired from the House. As a congressman, Hastert made a $2 million profit in 2006 when he sold a portion of farmland that he owned. The land was very close to a proposed highway, the Prairie Parkway, in Kendall County. A year earlier, he had used his power as speaker to deliver $207 million in federal grants for the parkway, which made his land more valuable. So political observers assumed the land deal was tied to the payoffs listed in the indictment.

Hastert certainly is not the first powerful Illinois politician to be involved in a sexual scandal. Rep. Mel Reynolds was convicted in 1992 of criminal sexual assault, child pornography and having sex with a volunteer campaign worker when she was only 16. Rep. Gus Savage, on a trip to Africa, allegedly fondled a Peace Corps volunteer and tried to force her to have sex with him. Rep. Thomas Railsback of Moline shared a vacation house with a fetching good-time party girl and lobbyist who exchanged sex with congressmen for their votes on a bill for which she was lobbying. Rep. Dan Crane of Danville was censured by the House for having sex with a 17-year-old congressional page.

HUSH MONEY?

Federal law enforcement officials said Hastert was paying someone to conceal sexual misconduct that dates to his time as a teacher before he went to Congress. He apparently paid millions of dollars in hush money.

The media assumed that this was a standard corruption case rather than a sexual scandal because Chicago is the most corrupt metropolitan region and Illinois remains the third-most-corrupt state in the nation. As my colleagues and I detail in our latest anti-corruption report, Chicago had 45 federal corruption convictions in 2013 alone. Illinois has had a grand total of 1,982 convictions for the 38 years since 1976 when the Department of Justice began compiling the statistics.

Corruption costs an estimated $500 million per year in the state, according to “Corrupt Illinois,” the book Tom Gradel and I just published. Illinois' reputation for corruption also causes companies to avoid locating here.

But the greatest cost of corruption is the loss of faith in the fairness and honesty of government. And this is where the Hastert affair enters in. We have not only crooked politicians but also possible pedophiles and sexual abusers—both Democrats and Republicans—in positions of great power.

We have both corruption and abuse in Illinois. And little faith in our government officials.

Dick Simpson is a professor of political science at the University of Illinois at Chicago and a former Chicago alderman.